Tomb of the Sacred Prostitute

This paper disentombs the ancient priestess Diotima, whose shadowy presence has haunted the phallic representations of woman fragmented in western thought and the masculine imaginary. It is in postmodernity – where the bodily boundaries of sex and gender, inside and outside, are losing definition – that this first woman of western philosophy can be reclaimed as a spirit, a mother and a whore. I read Diotima ¹ as a postmodern manifestation of the love-goddess Aphrodite: a goddess whose flesh is as important as her spirit, who simultaneously teaches the receiving and the giving of pleasure and the receiving and giving of knowledge. This (re-)reading of one of western philosophy’s founding texts, the Symposium, from the position of the subterranean presence of the hetairae of ancient Greece in this and others of Plato’s texts, could only be undertaken at this postmodern moment, in which many feminisms prevail from diverse subject positions: ² the historical moment in which prostitutes have collectively constructed their own political identity. ³